Live Long & Prosper

S. M. Hutchens on the Fifth
Commandment

When Mary and I were married more than twenty years ago, we decided that there
would be no television in our home, mostly for the advantage of our children,
whom we did not wish to be burdened with it. Several years ago we acquired a
small set and keep it in the basement, connected to a videotape player, which
gives us full control over what appears on the screen in our home. We still
do not have television reception, either by air or over cable.

This means that when I do watch television, once or twice a year, what I see
is more striking to me than to those who watch it regularly. I see the changes
that have come gradually to most people as abrupt and rather shocking. One of
the largest and most horrifying changes has been the portrayal of what is supposed
to be normal family life, of the normal and expected behavior of parents and
children. We have come a long way from “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father
Knows Best.”

The two things that have struck me most about what I have seen is the unspeakable
arrogance and insubordination of television’s children, and the aimlessness,
stupidity, and ineffectualness of television’s parents. Children are portrayed
as wise about the real shape of the world, and as the people to whom their bewildered
parents, caught in the tangle of outmoded ideas, must apply in order to understand
how things really are. Parents who are “with it” ultimately do not
resist the superior wisdom of their children, and end up confessing that really,
they would be just like their own wild, free offspring if they didn’t
have so many unreasonable inhibitions bred into them. If my own child said to
me or her mother some of the things TV regards as cute, or did what it treats
as normal teenage behavior, her life would be in danger (if her father survived
his heart attack). If you allow your children to imitate this language and behavior,
you are raising misfits and cultivating rebellion.

And this is only regular network television! In a hotel room several years
ago, I was treated to what I think is called “rock video,” which
looked like an attempt to make hell attractive. While I could only stomach a
few minutes of it, the theme was clearly that violence is pleasurable, especially
when it is carried out on the weak and helpless, and on authorities like teachers,
judges, and ministers.

A Commandment of Honor & Love

All this is an attack on the most excellent and beautiful commandment of the
Lord to

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so
that you may live long, and it may be well with you in the land which the
Lord your God gives you (Deuteronomy 5:16).

The commandment should not be viewed as a promise that all children who treat
their parents with respect will magically be given a long and happy life in
this world, for sometimes very good children are not, and they are rewarded
in the next. (Our Lord is the best example of this.)

What it is is a commandment that every child is to regard and treat his parents
with the respect due something that is important, something weighty. Parents
are not to be tossed off as insignificant, but one is to give them the attention
that one gives tot those from whom one draws his very being, for the begetting
and nurturing of the child carries on far beyond the marriage bed and the nursery.
It goes on all the rest of life, where the father and mother continue the work
of making the child, and eventually leave him in the hands of other fathers
and mothers, ultimately in the hands of the heavenly Father, the true Father
for whom all good parents raise their children, and their Mother, the Church
of Christ Jesus.

The bond that is created, not by the parents’ love alone, but by the
child retuning that love in the form of honor and respect, is at the heart of
what holds the race together, creating strong and secure social institutions,
beginning with the family. This honor, carried on from generation to generation,
each drawing by means of that honor the full strength and wisdom of those who
have gone before, makes for the secure and orderly environment that brings peace
and long life. It is something we have never realized to a very large degree
in the modern West, because we have not followed the commandment.

Growth in Wisdom

More typically, each generation in its youth deems itself wiser than the one
that went before, and the mistake is not recognized until it is too late. We
are coming into a time in history when one of the most foolish and insubordinate
generations that ever lived will become elderly. It, like every generation in
its old age, will want to be admired for its wisdom and listened to by those
who are younger, but it will be perhaps the most discarded and ignored generation
in history, for it has spent its younger days teaching its own children that
there is no authority they are bound to hear, least of all the putative authority
of advanced years.

It was God’s will that mankind should become increasingly wise, each
generation elevating itself in all ways by bowing to those that came before,
by considering their father and mother as weighty, and therefore being able
to take all the best from them as the parents had taken all the best from their
own. But this can only be done when father and mother are honored. Say what
you will about rigidity and stagnation, the remarkable social stability of many
Far Eastern societies is a reward for their obedience to this divine command.
This even goes a long way in explaining why Toyota makes a better car than General
Motors. Lots of things hold together better when the family from which they
come is constituted in honoring those who are further along.

Our Divine Parent

Now, someone might say, I have no parents, or may parents were fools, or one
or both of those who begot me did not act toward me as parents should I have
not real opportunity to honor them, and thus derive my rightful being from the.
This in an increasing problem as our society disintegrates.

This, however, I would say to him: Your real Father is God. He is the one from
whom you ultimately came and to whom you shall return. If you seek to honor
him, he will most certainly honor you. If you honor him, he will give you wisdom
and knowledge and satisfaction that goes beyond all riches. You will not be
able to contain all he will give you of his fatherhood, so let us hear not foolish
talk about your being disadvantaged, and of diminished responsibility because
you have had a bad home life.

The promise of God is that all who seek him will most certainly find him, and
he will make them fellow heirs of our Lord Jesus Christ in every good and perfect
gift. If you whine and carry on about your disadvantages, you are like that
miserable servant who complained to his lord that he had only been given one
talent, so he took it and hid it, refusing even to put it to the work of drawing
interest. Remember what happened to him? He was thrown out, and good riddance,
too. I will also say “Nonsense!” to those who complain that they
can’t know God as Father because their own fathers were defective. All
fathers are defective—except God. So, go to him. What is keeping you from
the prayer that will deliver you over to his infinite riches and wisdom in Christ
Jesus other than your own ridiculous and contemptible rebellion and self-pity?
Do you wish to be healed? Then quit feeling sorry for yourself. Rise up, my
friend, and walk! For God is your Father and Christ is your brother. Isn’t
this enough?

The Inevitability of Tradition

The honoring of father and mother, carried out consistently, generation after
generation, gives rise to Tradition. This is something we Americans, and we
Protestant Americans in particular, tend not to be very good at. Our coming
to the New World subjected us to strong severing forces, cutting us off from
the land in which our ancestors lived for many generations and which carried
in it the signs of the honor we paid our parents. I can trace my own family
back only to the shores of Virginia, to which Nicholas Hutchens came in the
late 1600s. There is no question, of course, that we were English, but for now
we can only pick up the thread in America. Grandfather Nicholas was a Quaker,
itself a sign of deep alienation from the larger Christian tradition, once removed
from Anglicanism, twice from Roman Catholicism, thrice from the undivided Church
of primitive Christendom. Tradition, and with it the honor of father and mother
it carries with it, dies easily upon these shores, whether we were brought here
as slaves or came of our own will.

This may not be all bad, for, sinners that we are, we are all too apt to make
the bad habits and attitudes we share with our parents, along with other weaknesses
peculiar to our races, into Holy Tradition, when in fact they are better shed.
Our Lord condemned the blindness that resulted when merely human traditions
overcame the word and will of God, and we tend to be very fond of the passages
where he does it. But he does not condemn Tradition itself, for Tradition is
what inevitably happens when we honor our father and mother. It is what connects
one generation and one family and one nation to another, and is meant to give
unity to the human race, identity to each of its members, and stability to its
institutions. Ultimately there can be no salvation without it, for we cannot
be saved unless we accept something from other Christians, from our parents
in God who have gone before us and have themselves preserved for us the saving
word of God in their bodies and minds.

It is this very gift we help overthrow when we allow ourselves and our children
to be influenced by the wretched, morally diseased world of which television
is the most pervasive and subtle representative. What this medium has done remarkably
well is carry to the common people the attitude toward honoring our parents
that has been characteristic of the skeptical intelligentsia for centuries,
but to which the average man—a creature of habit who mistrusts intellectuals—has
been resistant.

But let us make no mistake about the command itself. It is the first command
with a promise, full of life and health. The promise is that for those who honor
their father and their mother, for those who give appropriate weight and attention
to the past from which they have arisen, their futures shall go well. They shall
not only find truth and goodness upon the earth, but shall also find their way
back to the Father from whom all things come. This is as true today as it ever
was. •

“Live Long & Prosper” first appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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